Hello,

I'm sure this is against the rules in some fashion, and its probably not the best way to start my posting life on this forum, but I am at my wits end here and figured I would give this a shot.

I am trying to write a program that will mirror the standard output of LS on a linux machine. Meaning:

Multiple columns
Column widths are dynamic

Alphabetical order is not important for what I am trying to do

My problem is this:

I have parsed all the names of the members of the directory into an array.

When I created the array, I kept track of the longest record I put into it. Then, I divided the width of the terminal window by the longest record and got the worst case number of columns.

The tricky part is that before I start printing the items to the screen, I have to know how many columns I need. The width of each column is dependent on its longest member. That being the case, I can't figure out a programmatic way to check this status.

I know it sounds like I'm just fishing for answers here, but I have been at this for quite a few days now and I figure at this point that I am just overlooking something. If someone could, in the least, point me in the right direction. Google has yeilded little help and small hints are better than nothing.

Thanks, and sorry in advance for being one of "those guys"

Not sure what you mean about status, but in general, you find the worst case item (which you say you've done), then you assume all entries are that long and print accordingly in fixed-width/padded output.
You don't say which lang you are using and it'd be easier to show us your code, but the cmd in eg bash is http://linux.die.net/man/1/printf, base on the C fn of the same name.
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/internal.html#EX47

Sorry for not stating the language, its C, compiling using the GCC compiler on my machine.

If some of the stuff I am saying doesn't quite come through clearly, I am a little tired so I apologize for that.

Are you saying that I should just make all the columns the width of the worst case?

I am using the printf ("%-*s", max_column_width) statement right now, but don't yet have the information I need to feed to it.

When I run ls on this box, the column widths differ based on the longest item in that column, which is what I was having trouble with. Does ls behave that way on all flavors of linux?

My current idea was going to be to just run this whole thing in a loop. I would start with the worst case number of columns and each time the program realized that it could use more columns for the output, it would re-execute. Not the most efficient, but it would get the job done.

Once the items are all organized nicely in arrays, I can print them to the screen.

EDIT: I would post my code, but there are so many (wrong) things going on in it from my experimentations that it wouldn't be much help.

I can't think of any other way of doing it to get the ls optimal column widths because how else to know which column any particular file will be listed in after the first line? You could examine the source code for ideas. Here is OpenSolaris ls source code (a mere 3,167 lines!)

Well, my soln is the simple one. If you really wanted to get that complex, you could divide the file list into groups; each group as a separate column and use the longest file in each group as the col length, but it's more complex.
You'd have to ensure all the longest names can fit in one line...
You certainly can get the src code for all Linux cmds, so you could use that...